1. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. The message from God’s Word today for the 12th Sunday after Pentecost is taken from Isaiah 56:1,6-8 and is entitled, “The Savior of All Peoples,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. Long before there was a nation called Israel, there was a promise. In the garden of eden, after our first parents fell into sin, God spoke a word of hope even as he pronounced judgment: the seed of the woman would crush the serpent's head (Genesis 3:15). That promise did not belong to one family, one tribe, or one people. It belonged to the whole ruined human race. In time, God narrowed the channel through which that promise would flow — he called Abraham, Isaac, then Jacob, and made with them a covenant that the Savior of the world would be born from their line. Israel became the womb of the Messiah. But Israel was never meant to be the whole harvest. From the very beginning, God told Abraham, "in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Genesis 12:3). The Savior would be a Jew. But he would not be a Savior for Jews only.
3. That is what the prophet Isaiah is declaring in our text today. Chapters 56 through 66 of Isaiah form the final section of the book, and this passage stands as its opening. Isaiah writes, "Thus says the Lord: 'Keep justice, and do righteousness, for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance be revealed'" (Isaiah 56:1). Notice what comes first and what comes second. The command to "keep justice and do righteousness" is not the ground of salvation — it is the fruit of it. Isaiah roots the imperative in the promise: "for soon my salvation will come." The godly life follows from faith in the coming Messiah; it does not produce that faith. This is the same order the Lutheran Confessions insist upon again and again: we are justified by grace through faith apart from the works of the Law, and the good works that follow are the evidence of a living faith, not the cause of a right standing before God. The Hebrew word translated "deliverance" here — tsedaqah — is the same word rendered "righteousness." It points forward to the righteousness the Messiah himself would win: through his holy life, his innocent suffering, his death upon the cross, and his glorious resurrection, Christ acquired a righteousness that becomes ours by faith. That is the salvation Isaiah says is coming soon.
4. And then Isaiah does something remarkable. He tells us who gets to share in it. "And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants, everyone who keeps the Sabbath and does not profane it, and holds fast my covenant — these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples" (Isaiah 56:6–7). The foreigner. The outsider. The one who by birth had no claim on the covenant of Abraham. Isaiah says that such a person, brought to faith in the Lord, will minister to him, will love his name, will pray to him, will keep his covenant — and will be welcomed, not to the outer edge of the temple courts, but all the way in, to the holy mountain itself, to the house of prayer. This is not talking merely about geography or about the physical temple in Jerusalem. Our Lord himself quotes this very verse when he cleanses the temple, declaring, "My house shall be called a house of prayer" (Mark 11:17), and in doing so he points past the stones and the courtyard to the lasting reality: the spiritual kingdom of God, the household of faith, the Church, which no earthly wall can contain and no earthly nation can monopolize.
5. Isaiah presses the point home in verse 8: "The Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, declares, 'I will gather yet others to him besides those already gathered.'" First, the scattered, believing children of Israel will be gathered home — this is God's faithfulness to his ancient people, the very thing the Apostle Paul weeps over and rejoices in when he writes in Romans, "I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means!" and again, "as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable" (Romans 11:1, 28–29). But then comes the second gathering — "I will gather yet others." Others beyond Israel. Gentiles. People like you and me, who had no birthright claim on the covenant of Abraham, but who by grace alone, through faith alone, are grafted into the one people of God. Paul uses exactly this image a few verses later — wild branches grafted into the cultivated olive tree, sharing in its rich root (Romans 11:17). We are those wild branches. We are the "others." We are the ones Isaiah saw coming, centuries before we were born, gathered in by a mercy that reached across every boundary of blood and nation to find us.
6. We see a preview of this gathering already in the Old Testament. Long before Isaiah wrote these words, there was a Moabite woman named Ruth. A famine had driven Naomi's family from Bethlehem into Moab, where one of her sons married Ruth, a woman with no claim whatsoever on the God of Israel. But through the witness of that believing family, Ruth was brought to faith, and when tragedy struck and Naomi determined to return home, Ruth clung to her mother-in-law and spoke words that still move us: "Your people shall be my people, and your God my God" (Ruth 1:16). She was a foreigner. She was gathered in. And she became, in God's providence, the great-grandmother of King David — and so an ancestor of Jesus Christ himself. The Savior born of Israel had a Gentile grandmother, and Scripture is not embarrassed to tell us so.
7. This same gathering mercy is on full display in our Gospel reading. A Canaanite woman — a Gentile, an outsider by every human category the Jews of that day recognized — comes to Jesus crying out for her demon-oppressed daughter. At first Jesus seems to hold her at arm's length, testing and drawing out the faith that he already knows is there. She will not let go. "Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table," she says (Matthew 15:27), and Jesus answers, "O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire" (Matthew 15:28). Here is Isaiah 56 walking and talking in the flesh — a foreigner, clinging to the Lord, ministering to him in prayer, and being welcomed not to the crumbs under the table but to the full mercy of the Master himself.
8. Beloved in Christ, this is why we can sing with the psalmist, "Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you! Let the nations be glad and sing for joy" (Psalm 67:3, 4). This is not a generic goodwill toward all religions or all paths to God. It is the specific, joyful confession that the one true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, sent his own Son to be the Savior of the whole world — Jew and Gentile alike. None of us stood inside that holy mountain by right of birth. We were, every one of us, foreigners to the covenant, dead in our trespasses, until Christ by his blood brought us near (Ephesians 2:12–13). And having been so gathered, we do not now stand at the door looking in — we are made priests who minister before him, whose prayers and praises he receives as pleasing sacrifices, not because of who we are, but because of whose we are.
9. So what does this mean for us, today? It means, first, that we rejoice that God's house is called a house of prayer for all peoples, and that includes us. It means, second, that we hold fast to what has been given to us: Word and Sacrament, the ministry of Christ still gathering the outcasts and the far-off ones today, right here in this congregation. And it means, third, that we take seriously our calling to support the spread of this same Gospel, so that others — still more others, still being gathered even now — would hear that the mountain gate stands open, that the house of prayer has room, and that the Savior of all peoples died and rose for them too.
10. These verses from Isaiah remind us why the Son of God became man: to live and die as the Savior of all peoples. Rejoice — God's kingdom is inclusive, not because it lowers its truth to include everyone, but because its Savior's mercy is wide enough to reach everyone who comes to him in faith. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, until life everlasting. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment